Number of registered Nanjing Massacre survivors falls to 23

NANJING -- Pan Qiaoying, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, passed away on Thursday at the age of 95, announced the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders on Friday.

With her death, the number of living registered survivors of the atrocity has dropped to 23, said the memorial hall in Nanjing, the capital city of East China's Jiangsu province.

The Nanjing Massacre refers to a period of history that started when Japanese troops captured the then-Chinese capital on Dec 13, 1937. In the space of six weeks, the Japanese invaders killed approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.

Pan was only six years old in 1937 when Japanese forces entered Nanjing. Hiding inside a kitchen stove, she witnessed Japanese soldiers stab her grandfather, father and cousin to death with bayonets.

Multiple registered survivors have passed away in recent years, and thus, the number of those able to share firsthand accounts of the massacre continues to decline.

In 2014, China's top legislature designated Dec 13 as the national memorial day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre. The Chinese government has also preserved survivors' testimonies, recorded in both written and video transcripts. These documents relating to the massacre were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2015.